Beyond the sterility of the tourism “sector”

The complex of research results achieved so far by the so-called “territorialist school” clearly shows an extreme reduction in the dynamics of the production and re-production of territories and landscapes via interaction between human communities and the environment. Moreover, the author’s research in the field of the ‘fragile areas’, particularly the mountains ones, reveals that the more the need of protection of landscape is emphasized, the more some purely ‘contemplative’ (not reproductive) forms of tourism are identified as the only economic activity able to guarantee that protection. In other words, it seems paradoxally believed that in order to preserve the landscapes historically generated by the interaction between human beings and environment, it is necessary to interrupt that same mutual interaction. To face the above trend towards ‘tourist sterility’, the research described here aims at contributing to the emergence of productive and sustainable uses of territorial resources, in which the tourist use component is fully integrated with other productive components and re-productive, and even better is able to generate effective chains of production and re-production of territories and landscapes. To pursue the aforementioned research objective, different cases/experiences are combined, to bring out from them the emerging potentialities of (re)triggering of interactions productive, and re-productive, of territory/landscape. From the results obtained through the comparison of the above case studies, we can preliminarily conclude that what is mostly needed now is a profound rethinking of territory and landscape as commons, also in the light of the experiences of collective properties and civic uses running through all of history of co-evolutionary interactions between human beings and environment, that it seems nowadays essential to update and to decline in retro-innovative forms of multifunctional use of land (tourist too), in order to foreshadow processes of reterritorialization really self-organized, and as such (re)productive of ‘living landscapes’.